Blame It on Poor Old John McCain

The Right Wing “Blame Game” Has Begun:
My Monday Herald Tribune brought the first of what is likely to be an elaborate effort by the right wing in Republican politics to shift the burden of responsibility for their losses in 2008 from themselves to Senator John McCain. The story quoted conservative political commentator Bill Kristol as saying on Fox News, “It’s a stupid campaign,” and “It’s really become a pathetic campaign;” things that he repeated in a column for the New York Times.

“Conservative Republicans” didn’t like McCain in the first place, largely because they did not see him as embracing their right wing religious and political agenda with sufficient zealousness; but they didn’t have a candidate like the one they found in born-again, George Bush.

However, their beloved candidate, President George Bush, is not on the ticket, having engineered one of the worst Administrations in American history, leaving with an approval rating that is among the lowest in the history of polling. Even not on the ticket, however, the failures of George Bush and his conservative cohorts hover eerily over the election like ethereal ghosts seem to hover over a battle field where tens of thousands have perished.

Dishonest to the Core:
Before this is over, the right wing Republican apologists and commentators will have convinced themselves, their unthinking zealots and partisans, and some elements of the uneducated America that John McCain is the reason they lost this election and their place in the sun. This will become the imaginative “conservative theory” for the Republican loss in 2008. It wasn’t George Bush, the Republicans in Congress, the Christian Coalition, or the conservative media pundits. It was John McCain, all by his lonesome, although some might say he had a little help from his friend, Sarah Palin.

They will say he ran a terrible campaign; that he did not demonize Obama sufficiently with their version of “moral clarity;” that he lost simply because of ineptness or that he wasn’t conservative (their version of conservatism) enough. That will be the spin line taken by Bill Kristol, Russ Limbaugh, Michael Savage and their like.

This is revisionist history at its worse; inaccurate, dishonest to the core, and totally self-serving for their conservative cause. McCain becomes the scapegoat for the Republican electoral failure while they ignore almost everything that would indict them and their cause.

It remains me of the notorious “explanation” for the German failure in World War I; where the Nazi’s blamed the entire loss on Jews and Jewish bankers. The right wing of the Republican Party is taking exactly the same tact with John McCain, although they cannot quite match Joseph Goebbels for viciousness– getting close with Bill Ayers, but not quite a match, yet!

The Republicans are losing for many reasons, with John McCain among the less important, and the failure to recognize these reasons will harm the Republican cause for years to come.
In the end, the Republican Party in Congress and the Administration quite literally forgot who they were and what they promised the American people. Promising responsible fiscal conservatism, they delivered instead the single most fiscally irresponsible Government in modern times. Promising to protect our national security, they have done more actually to undermine our national security than any administration in modern times. Instead of promoting a rational policy of supporting free market capitalism, they have moved American more toward socialism than any Administration in memory.

Eroding National Security and American Sovereignty:
The Republicans Conservatives particularly try to promote themselves as the champions of a "strong and powerful" America, with Democrats as "national security wimps." We entered the Bush Administration with increasing national power and sovereignty backed by a strong dollar, growing financial reserves, a healthy economy, and the strongest military in the world.

We will end the Bush Administration the greatest debtor nation in the world, beholden on all sides to unfriendly regimes that have trillions of our dollars; unparalleled and highly limiting national debt and deficits; an economy in full financial crisis; and a military whose strengths have been wasted on a hugely expensive and unnecessary war in Iraq. No administration in our history has ever left office with our sovereignty and security so remarkably diminished and imperiled at the hands of our elected leaders. These are the facts about national security; not the propaganda of Republican apologists like Bill Kristol.

We are in a new era of greatly reduced international ambitions, caused almost entirely by the Republicans in Washington, starting with the stars of the Bush Administration – George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfiwitz, the gang that truly could not shoot straight.

President Obama will find his options limited in virtually everything because there simply isn’t going to be any money available to do much of anything. We have got a lot of big bombs and the means to deliver them, but a diminishing amount of money to pay our soldiers. We cannot use money as a tool of diplomacy because we do not have the money. We cannot use our historically good reputation as a tool of diplomacy, because Bush clearly trashed our reputation worldwide. We cannot continue fighting two wars with debt financing because our system can barely stand the debt it has. The engine of our future prosperity, our powerful economy, has been hobbled by unfettered and uncontrolled financial systems, which we are now propping up with a heavy dose of state socialism.

The conservative Republicans will be the last ones in the entire world to acknowledge this catastrophe, because it happened on their watch, with their champions holding the power and the cards, and with their philosophies dictating policy. It is the perfect end result of the policies and people they espoused and supported for eight years. No, it is much better to blame it all on John McCain, whose primary error was the selection of Sarah Palin, whom these same conservatives pundits all vigorously applauded and defended.

The Worse Is Yet to Come for the Republicans, and the Country:
We are in a recession, and it may be a deep one if the collective governments cannot get the banks to stop overreacting and start lending money to people. Without bank financing, the automobile market will disintegrate and the new construction of homes will not recover, and those sectors in steep decline will send shock waves throughout Europe and the United States. There will be a recession, with lots of Americans and Europeans out of work, injuring the retail sales of nearly everything, and injuring the developing countries everywhere.

Young Americans under 35 are the most vulnerable. When job creation stops, they feel it first. They are supporting Barack Obama by a huge margin, and they will continue to support him for the full eight years if he does well as a President. These same Americans are not much interested in the religious doctrines and cant of the Christian Conservatives. They are far more liberal and libertarian than their parents; and the appeals of "cultural conformity" of the religious right will fall on very deft ears with a majority of these voters.

The Republican Party, particularly the Christian Conservatives, are driving a majority of the next generation of Americans firmly into the Democratic Party, perhaps on the same scale as the younger generation joined the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt from 1932 through 1940. Once these young people are securely identified and involved with the Democratic Party, they will guarantee an increasing Democratic majority as older Republicans pass on. Historians will eventually attribute this shift to the behavior of the Republicans during the Bush years.

The Republican conservatives and their religious allies can and will certainly rewrite history to suit their own interests. Their "villain" will be John McCain: with George Bush exonerated, his Administration deified and the conservative zealots (pundits and analysts) excused. The only thing they will prove, however, is that there is not an ounce of intellectual honesty in the lot of them.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black